The Start…..

Making changes in your life can be hard. Making changes to the way you view and consume food is often the most difficult. For such a basic primal instinct to be curtailed is hard to keep up. We have a need for nourishment which in days gone by was often scarce, seasonal and probably uninteresting by todays standards. Now, however, with massive supermarkets and the availability of foreign cuisine and all year round foodstuffs ” we have never had it so good”. Or so the big food producers and sellers would have us believe.

I was brought up after the war when, although food was easy to come by, it was basic and nourishing. It was also seasonal so no winter vegetables in the summer and no soft fruit out of their growing season.

With a growing population, ways of upping production all year round and the need to import even more food stuffs began to be more necessary. With advances in refrigeration (who owned a fridge in those days !!) and science, the farmers and food producers were able to meet the growing need but at what cost to our health?.

Only now are we beginning to see that maybe using herbicides and pesticides on a grand scale may be having a detrimental effect on our health, and maybe the amount of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals pumped into farm animals regularly is going up the food chain.

So to the end of the rant and to the purpose of my blog. In it I hope to chart my progress on the Autoimmune Paleo way of eating. I have been about 80/20 percent Paleo now for a few years and I must say I quite like this way of eating. I am “fortunate” in having developed a severe intolerance to cows milk and most of the things made from it, so cutting out dairy was not a problem for me. I have never really liked beans (except baked beans) so not eating legumes was a doddle. Giving up grains is hard, but there are so many good substitutes out there so I could still have cake and biscuits, Why oh why do tomatoes and potatoes have to be non Paleo, these were two I miss a lot. Loads of recipes benefit from a tomato base and who does not like oven baked chips or roast potatoes.

Even with changes made to encompass the Paleo way of eating I still have niggly aches and pains and what is commonly known as brain fog and I still do not have the energy I feel I should have. And so we come to the autoimmune protocol and the Paleo way of eating. This is even more restrictive than Paleo but still has loads of food choices, just need to think in a different way.

I have been eating autoimmune now for about 1 1/2 weeks and I think I am beginning to feel physically better so I am going to persevere and thought that writing about it, how I feel and what I actually eat would help to keep me on track. During this time I have come to the conclusion that I do not really enjoy ‘mixed up, meals I would rather have things separated on my plate. Not to say I do not enjoy a dish of chicken in herbs and oranges ,or a good breakfast pattie as long as the things that go with it are individual.

The hardest thing so far is having to have breakfast, not something I have enjoyed since my early teens. I have persevered and now enjoy homemade patties each morning with avocado (when they have not gone off), cucumber and a few blueberries. I only drink green tea and Evian bottled water, I had to give up diet coke, not the paleo way.

Next time I will post about what I have eaten, how I feel and how I am getting on with my new jawbone up wristband.